Lighting the Torch for In-App AR Development, with TORCH’s Paul Reynolds

XR for Business

English - September 04, 2019 09:56 - 41 minutes - 38.4 MB - ★★★★★ - 12 ratings
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Game engines
like the versatile Unity have long been the go-to for AR development,
and for good reason. But its reputation as a video game engine can
also be intimidating — especially to those who want to create AR
software for enterprise. That’s why Paul Reynolds lit his TORCH; an
app he co-founded that lets you design your own AR platform, right in
the palm of your hand. He chats with Alan about his claim to flame.

Alan: Hey, everyone, my name’s
Alan Smithson, the host of the XR for Business Podcast. Today’s guest
is Paul Reynolds, the CEO of Torch, a really exciting augmented
reality platform. It’s a mobile augmented reality development and
deployment platform for enterprise. Paul has been a software
developer and technology consultant since 1997 – since before the
interwebs! In 2013, after 10 years of creating video games, he joined
Magic Leap where he was promoted to senior director, overseeing
content and SDK teams. At Magic Leap, Paul recognized the lack of
accessible tools for non-game developers that was hindering
widespread adoption of immersive and spatial computing technologies.
In 2016, Paul moved to Portland, Oregon, where he founded Torch to
address this very problem. To learn more about Torch, you can visit
torch.app. Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul: Thanks for having me.

Alan: It’s such a pleasure. I’ve
been looking forward to this episode. Torch is such a cool platform
and I keep seeing your posts on LinkedIn of putting stuff around your
office and stuff. So tell us, what is Torch, and how did you come up
with this crazy idea?

Paul: The easiest way to think
about it is, it’s a mobile application — currently for iOS — that
lets anyone build interactive spatial scenes. So, you create a
project and you’re building it in the camera of your device, which
means you’re also walking around the space, or moving around the
space and you’re building up interactive experiences visually,
without writing any code. We call that the design environment, and
that’s the freely available [option] — anyone can jump into it and
just start building. What makes it a platform is the capability of
taking what you’ve created in Torch, and exporting it and publishing
it and integrating it into your existing app, or pushing it out to
another platform or tool. What we really wanted to focus on was
allowing people to iterate in augmented reality — directly within
augmented reality — as opposed to sitting on a desktop computer and
trying to figure out how to work a game editor, and get more people
able to work productively in 3D. That’s really the heart of it.

Alan: That’s so cool, because if
you’re sitting at your office, you’re like, “wow, this AR stuff
is hot. It’s amazing.” You know what, go learn Unity and coding
and figure out how to actually make it. Six months later, you’re
like, “oh, look, I made a portal.”

Paul: [laughs] Right.

Alan: What you guys have built
is a simple way to just do it visually.

Paul: Thanks for having me.

Paul: [laughs] Right.

Alan: What you guys have built
is a simple way to just do it visually.

Paul: Yeah. So, my background
was in video games, back in the day where everyone was building their
own engine. You really didn’t even have time to build a really nice
editor on top of that. So when Unity came out — we’ll pick on Unity
in particular, because it’s just such a well-known product — when it
came out, it was the game engine that most of these game studios I’ve
worked for wanted to build. And that was really unique; they had
basically taken what would normally mean millions and millions of
internal R&D dollars, and turned it into this tool that pretty
much anyone can download for free. But what happened over the past
few years is, it’s become kind of the de facto interactive 3D tool.
And it was for me as well; I’ve been a Unity user forever. What we
learned when we started building a platform at Magic Leap for third
party developers that are not necessarily all looking to build video
games — so, enterprises and brands — the conversation there was
first, somebody in your team needs to learn Unity to even get
started. Just like you said.

Alan: And this like a red flag
for these companies because they’re like, “what the hell is
Unity?”

Paul: Right, yeah.

Alan: And then they ask their
tech teams and they’re like, “does anybody know Unity?” And
nobody knows what it is. Then they look it up, they’re like, “oh.
Yeah, well, that’s for video games.”

Paul: Right! That’s exactly
right. And the disconnect that has been — coming as a veteran game
developer — a young kid comes up to me and says, “I want to get
into making video games.” I’m gonna say “download Unity —
for free — and take the tutorials, and you’ll learn just as much
about real professional video game development as anyone else that’s
actually out there as professional video game developers.” So,
in our world, Unity — and let’s not just pick on Unity all the time,
you know, there’s Unreal. There’s these other engines–

Alan: Improbable.

Paul: Yeah. For us, they’re the
easiest way to get in. But then you have to remember — what I saw
firsthand — was most of our target market for Torch, and most of the
people I was dealing with at Magic Leap, they’d never heard of Unity.
You’ve got to imagine there’s a much bigger world out there besides
ours, that people don’t even know where to get started. I said,
“look, the world is going to move towards spatial computing,
where computing is going to be in our world, and there’s 3D input,
there’s 3D display, and there’s cameras involved. And we’ve got to
come up with more accessible ways to build software and experiences
for these platforms, that doesn’t just come from video game
technology.” (All that said, video game technology certainly
plays an important role in all of this.) We said, “well, how are
people building mobile apps today? How are web apps getting built?”
Businesses are run — and new businesses are created — on top of
these platforms. How do people build software — in 2018 at the time
— what’s their workflow? The workflow is very design-oriented and
very visual, at first. Instead of us building a piece of functional
software, and then handing it to a designer and say, “hey, make
this look nice and usable.” The mobile world in particular has
put a lot of investment and flipped it on its head and said, “let’s
make a functional prototype first — that everyone can all agree
around — and say, yeah, this is the thing we want to build,”
and then you engineer around it.

That was ultimately how we arrived at
the current version of Torch, where we wanted to fit in with that
enterprise workflow. And we say, “well, you’ve already used this
idea in mobile apps in particular: prototype first, in-design first.
So that’s what we built for AR; anyone can just jump into this and
start putting 2D assets in video. We help you find 3D models. We have
the requisite Sketchfab and Poly integrations. You can find 3D
models. We’ve got Dropbox integration. Even though anyone can
download it and start playing with it and working in it, we’ve tuned
the integrations and the workflow around your standard UX designer,
or a creative person at an agency, or someone that’s already building
digital products that are enterprise, and we’re saying “here’s
how you can start to test out, and share, and show some of these
early ideas around augmented reality.” And as you get more
comfortable with what’s good and bad in mobile augmented reality in
particular, we’ll be there for you to help you get that deployed, and
help you get that integrated, and turn it into a real product.

Alan: So it’s really a
prototyping tool then.

Paul: So… it’s funny; it
started strictly as a prototyping tool. Anyone can jump in and build
something. The only thing you can really get out of it, was you could
record a video — which is still very important in the screen-based
world we’re in still, to be able to share an AR experience through
video. But to add a collaborator, or have someone actually view what
you’ve built in real time, you had to add them as an editor. We have
a Google Doc-style, real-time collaborative editing, where you can
have as many people as you want in a project, but you’re also giving
them permission to edit the project.

Alan: That’s the last thing you
want. [laughs]

Paul: Yeah, yeah. We’ve had
people ask, “how many people can I add? Technically, how many
collaborators can you handle?” And the answer is always,
technically way more than you actually want collaborating, anyway.

Alan: No kidding.

Paul: We’ve had upwards of, I
think, 50 people on one project before. The way we do the
collaborative stuff, it’s not very taxing computationally. So, you
can have tons and tons of people in there. After being out for… I
would say, two or three months, we started seeing this trend, where
people were coming to us and saying, “Torch is great. It’s the
first time I’ve been able to actually feel like I’m creating in AR; I
can pull in my assets” — and these are all professionals and
they’re very limited on time — and they’ve said, “but how do we
get this out of Torch? Where does it go?” Keeping in mind, we
were patterning ourselves after — back to the mobile app world —
where people may prototype in something like Sketch and InVision and
Figma — these functional prototyping tools — and Framer. And then,
once they decide to build the production version, they usually go to
code; they’ll build it in React or whatever. And so originally, our
thought was, well, we’ll get the creative people iterating visually
in our prototyping tool, and that will inform the production team.
So, these people will probably wind up building this stuff in Unity,
or Spark, or Lens Studio — whatever the tools are at the time. But
there’s this moment of handoff. The interesting thing in hindsight is
kind of obvious, which was what I said earlier: a lot of the people
that found us, don’t even know what Unity is.

Alan: So you’re like, “oh,
wait a second, we’ve built this tool for you. And yeah, you can use
it. But then you got learn… yeah. Oh, oops!”

Paul: Yeah. And on top of that,
the things people are building today are fairly simple. Even the
people that knew what Unity was, they’re like, “wait, you’re
telling me I’m going to rebuild this thing, but it already works in
Torch? So why can’t I just get it out?” And that was always on
our longer-term roadmap. But we’re like, okay, this is obviously the
direction we need to support, because now we have this very
accessible, extremely fast workflow, that you can use as just a
prototyping, pre-visualization environment. But we started adding
more and more functionality to it, that would allow you to build
full-blown experiences. It’s just a totally alternative augmented
reality workflow, that people could use depending upon their use
case.

And the other part of it was we were
like, today — and still, this is true in the moment — right now,
today, where is all the engagement, and — quite frankly — revenue,
and where’s the rubber really meeting the road? In particular, with
mobile augmented reality? And the obvious answer to me was social:
Snapchat, and Facebook, and Instagram. They are pumping out a lot of
augmented reality content. They’re making real revenue from it.
They’re getting huge engagement. People are building lenses and
filters that are getting hundreds of millions and billions of views.
And brands are trying to figure out how to get into that. So we said,
“well, those are pretty simple experiences.” We don’t do
anything with the face in Torch; we’re fully concentrated on the
world-facing camera, and the world-based experiences on those
platforms are fairly simple. And we said, “well, if we gave
people a few more authoring capabilities beyond just prototyping —
let them hook up some more interactivity and call APIs and things
like that — and then we allow them to publish out to these
production platforms. We’re kind of filling a need in a lot of ways;
filling a very fragmented ecosystem. Because the other part of this
was,we kind of addressed the initial friction — for any enterprise
that’s probably listening to this podcast, and they’re trying to
figure out, “how do we even get started?” — we are trying
to be there to say, “we are literally the fastest and easiest
way to get started.” And we feel like we’ve fulfilled that
promise pretty well.

But then, the other part of it is on
the outside of the creation; it is the distribution and deployment.
And if you look at that, it’s very fragmented. If you want to build
for Snapchat, you’ve got to use Lens Studio. If you want to build for
any of the Facebook properties, you’ve got to use Spark. If you want
to build a fully-dedicated AR app, you’ll probably use Unity. If you
want to embed an AR experience in an existing mobile app — which is
a very popular request we hear — you’ve either got to write to
Google Sceneform or Apple’s ARKit, or kind of hack Unity into your
mobile app. It’s all very fragmented by the tool. So, we’ve
eliminated the fragmentation at the early prototyping part, but
there’s still all these crazy problems on the distribution side. In
the New Year, in 2019 — and most recently — we’ve put a lot of
effort in letting you publish and export out. The most exciting thing
we announced around that was around the time of AWE – Augmented World
Expo – we announced Torch 3, which lets you create a public link to
your project.

Alan: Oh, cool.

Paul: Yeah, it opens in the
Torch app, as a viewer-only mode. So, you’re not adding people as
collaborators. We don’t require the viewer to log-in or register.
They do have to download the Torch app. But it’s a very quick, fast
way to say, “hey, I built something in AR. I want to tweet it
out. I want to put it on LinkedIn,” or, “I want to send it
to my client, or my internal team.” And people can very quickly
iterate and view it, in real-time interactive 3D.

The other thing we announced is our
ability to export a Torch project into another project. Our
demonstration of that was, we were able to generate a Spark AR
project from Torch. So — for Mother’s Day — we built a little
Mother’s Day experience in Torch, but we actually published it
through Facebook–

Alan: Cool.

Paul: –through the Spark
export. So, that’s where we evolved beyond just prototyping, and

[became]

kind of a creative tool.

Alan: It’s awesome that you
didn’t set out with that intention, but you ended up there.

We always knew that we would start with
designers and grow a platform around that. I think what happened was
we mapped to the mobile ecosystem — which is very mature — and the
AR ecosystem is still growing and maturing. And if this were a much
more established market, we probably could have built a pretty tidy
business, just being considered the AR design tool. But we saw these
bigger opportunities for filling in these gaps in the ecosystem. So,
in some ways, it’s where we expected to go. But in other ways, we got
there a little quicker than we had originally thought we should or
would. And it’s been very well-received.

Alan: You’ve been working on
this for a bit. How are businesses using this right now?

Paul: It’s kind of across the
board. We’ve got people building Torch projects as internal tests or
prototypes. But we have had people — and especially now that we just
turned on this ability to publish and export; it’s technically under
early access right now — we’ve been giving it out to people, so
people are still just getting their heads wrapped around what they
can deploy and what they can do with this capability. We’ve seen
people use it for wayfinding — a super popular use case for us —
because if you build content in the environment using a mobile
device, building in a wayfinding experience — where you’re actually
setting the checkpoints on the wayfinding experience physically in
the environment — is just so much more intuitive and fast. For
example, we built a couple wayfinding demos for Torch that have
always gotten huge response online when we post videos. And… it’s
really funny, because the first time I posted a wayfinding demo, of
how to get from the front door of our office building to the front
door of our office–.

Alan: I saw that it was cool.

Paul: It’s funny, because I’ve
had people get to our office by saying, “I watched the video,”
or “I remember the video and I just remembered how to get here,”
which was kind of fun. But the funny thing was the divide in my
super-savvy AR friends who’ve been in the business as long as I have.
They thought we had scanned the building, or done complex
measurements, because the wayfinding experienced in that case
actually goes across two floors — two levels of the building — and
they’re like, “what did you do? Did you scan it in, and then
bring it into Unity?” I was like, “I literally stood at the
front door and I placed the welcome checkpoint, and then I walked to
the bottom of the stairs and place that.” We actually priced
that out, and if you were to build it with the traditional
desktop-based workflow, you’d have a team of people working on it,
and we estimated it would take roughly $100,000 or more, a team of
four people, and probably at least a few weeks to get it something
workable and viewable. And I built it in about 45 minutes on a lunch
break, and probably total cost — including recording the video and
buying a couple 3D models — we were into it for just a couple
thousand bucks. We’re talking about radically transforming the cost
of building these experiences. So, wayfinding’s a great example of
the cost efficiencies brought in when you actually build AR
experiences inside of AR, like we do.

As far as vertical markets, we’re
seeing a lot of interest around eCommerce, obviously — in shopping.
But also physical retail. People are really interested in bringing a
layer of digital experience into the retail environment. Travel and
hospitality has been very engaged. Media companies. One of my
favorite examples — I will qualify it with they are not using Torch
yet — but ABC News Australia. I don’t if you follow Nathan Bazley on
Twitter, but he posts these great little infographics in AR that
they’ve built. We actually reached out to him and talked to him about
his process. And ABC Australia is kind of like the BBC; they’re a
government-funded media company, and two or three years ago, they saw
AR as an interesting way to present information and to engage. And
they actually built an Unreal engine-based app to publish news
content to go on with their news. It was so expensive and difficult
to update the app, every time they had a news story! Still, kudos for
even getting it out, because that’s a huge leap, and no telling how
much they spent.

Alan: Oh my God. In the hundreds
of thousands.

Paul: Yeah. At least. Right? But
they did see engagement. So, when Facebook came out with Spark, they
said, “most of our audience is on Facebook and Instagram, so
this is a great distribution for us. We could try this again.”
And they taught themselves Spark. So now they have a little team of
— I think — four people, two or four people, that build these
little AR experiences that go along with that news story. And Nathan
was telling us — and I think I’m quoting this correctly — when they
put out a news video on those social channels, it gets around
30,000-50,000 views. And when they would put out a world filter, or
AR-based experience, through the same channels, they were getting
hundreds of thousands of views, highly engaged. What’s exciting for
us is that they’re getting this value through this one workflow. So,
what we can offer them — as an example — is, well, how about
everyone in your newsroom can start creating AR experiences to go
along with their stories, instead of running through this really
small team that’s taught themselves Spark? That’s what we think Torch
can provide, is that accessible workflow. And by the way, if you’re
already putting together the experience and these assets, and you’re
building this AR thing, why not deploy it everywhere AR can be
viewed? Why not push it to not just Facebook, but possibly Snapchat?
But also your own mobile app that people have installed? And what
about wearables? Giving people this flexibility and freedom of
publishing is something that we’re seeing resonate with, like, media
companies; people in the book industry, and film and television.

Alan: You don’t want to make
things twice, that’s for sure.

Paul: Not when it’s this hard
and expensive — and experimental — for a lot of people.

Alan: No, you’re right. So
you’ve been working on this for a couple years now. You were Magic
Leap before. What are some of the experiences that you’ve seen —
either made on Torch or otherwise — that have just kind of blown
your mind?

Paul: I mean, obviously, my
early days and Magic Leap, it was really where I saw incredible
things I’d never seen before. That was when I became convinced that
spatial computing was coming. Some of that stuff is now public. Now
that they’ve released the device and some of the content, I was a
part of the org of that company that built the Dr. G, game where
they’re shooting robots.

Alan: Yeah. Cool to see that for
the first time.

Paul: And we’re talking 2014?
That was pretty cool, but it’s only gotten better. Obviously, most of
my most crazy experiences have been around that tech in particular,
just because we used a bunch of different hardware and stuff. The
Magic Leap one that just shipped last year is certainly the most
consumer-friendly version of the tech that we’d worked with. But
there were some demos and things that I saw that were just very
unusual, where people are claiming that they feel temperature changes
on their hands when a little firefly-type robot flies up to their
finger, or they actually have a sense of weight of an object because
of the way the optics were kind of showing stuff in true 3-D. So some
of that stuff was pretty mind-blowing.

I’m trying to think of my most
recent… I really think, because I’m so in the weeds and I always
look at the technical execution of stuff, both Apple and their quick
look stuff that they’re showing, where they’re actually real-time
generating shadows, light estimation and reflections. And I don’t
know if you’ve seen it, but you can bring in, like, a shiny toaster,
and you can wave your hand past the virtual toaster, and you can
actually see your hand reflecting in it.

Alan: How are they doing that?

Paul: They’re building on an
environment map in real time. And so as you’re moving around–.

Alan: What, are they using the
camera to capture the environment?

Paul: Yep.

Alan: Oh, my God. That’s
amazing.

Paul: Yeah, it’s really cool. To
be fair to everyone else, Apple’s very tightly coupled to the
hardware. Everything is super optimized, and they can actually do
these things because they’re in control of the hardware. It’s a
little more difficult to do in a very cross-platform type of context.
I really liked the… I want to say “wonderscape,” but I
think it’s “wonderSCOPE…” the books–

Alan: Oh yeah. Those are cool.

Paul: Yeah, I like to show
those. The other part of it is, is the experimental side. I follow a
lot of the Snapchat lens and the Instagram creator community. There’s
some folks like Zach Lieberman and Max Weisel — they’re all doing
really interesting stuff, and they don’t have a commercial
motivation. They’re just seeing what weird things they can do with
this technology. And I really think that’s where we’re seeing the
most creative stuff come out. Zach Lieberman in particular has an app
called… Weird? Is it Weird Type for ARKit? It’s like a toy type of
thing, where you can walk around and place words, and have them react
to your movements. And that’s always pretty fun to show people is
really cool.

Alan: Have you tried Babble
Rabbit?

Paul: Yeah. That’s Patrick
[O’Shaughnessey]’s. His baby, right? That’s running on top of 6D?.

Alan: Yeah, exactly.

Paul: Yeah. We’re buddies of the
6Ds guys.

Alan: Actually, Matt
[Miesnieks]’s been a guest on the show.

Paul: Oh, nice. Yeah. I’ve known
him for a while. We actually announced that we integrated 6D into
Torch as a proof of concept.

I’m pretty excited about both occlusion
and persistence. I think persistence really changes the game for a
lot of people. Once people start to get their head around — again, I
go back to our target market; they’re so new to this world — I’ve
shown people in real time; I’ve built a project in Torch on an iPad
in front of them, and I’ve built a little scene on top of a table.
And even then, they still don’t quite get that they can walk around
that thing that I’ve put out into the world. They think it’s like a
static [image]; like, a 2D thing on top of video. They just… people
still have not unlocked the spatial part of their mind with this
stuff. Which is crazy, because we live in a 3D world, and 3D people.
When you do see people get past that initial understanding of what’s
going on, then their assumption is, “oh, well, when I build
something, or place that in the world, it’ll just stay there, and
somebody else walks in the room, they’ll see it. And if I leave the
room and come back tomorrow, it’ll be here tomorrow.”

Alan: It should, really.

Paul: Yeah, “should!”
Yeah. They’re absolutely right.

Alan: Let’s be honest. That’s
what we expect. And I even expect that! The only technology that’s
lived up to its promise of, like, rock-solid persistence has been the
Hololens.

Paul: Yeah. It is a hard
technical problem to solve, but there’s so many people working on it,
and we’re getting closer now. Microsoft’s got a great product around
it. Google kind of shocked me a couple of years ago, when they
announced their spatial anchors were cross-platform.

Alan: Apple seems to the only
one that is playing in their own sandbox, and they don’t play well
with others.

Paul: Yeah.

Alan: Like, what is USDZ?

Paul: Yeah.

Alan: Come on. Like, everybody
in the world is moving to GLTF — for the people listening, GLTF and
USDZ and FBX, they’re all 3D model formats, and the world hasn’t come
to a standard. But we were getting close. Everybody was moving
towards GLTF, and then Apple decided to invent their own.

Paul: Yeah, yeah. We used GLTF
at Torch. We have a pretty sophisticated asset processor, so we
actually take 70 different file formats. But on the back end, we
always turn them in the GLTF, and on our export, we always turn them
into GLTF.

Actually, I got a funny little side
story around that; as a part of this export and publish thing —
having the industry agree upon a 3D model format, like you said, it’s
still not fully agreed upon, but it’s getting pretty close; if you
can handle GLTF, FBX, or OBJ, those are pretty well-supported,
well-known file formats, but they’re not interactive. There’s no
interaction in that. And the Torch is all about building interactive
scenes. I put an object in a space, and I want to respond once
somebody walks up to it, or when they look at it, or when they tap
it. To be able to do this whole publishing and export thing, we had
to come up with our own GLTF-equivalent for interactive scenes; this
portable file format for saying, here’s a construction of a scene,
and here’s all the interactions that are connected to it. Apple just
announced — at WWDC a few weeks ago — their reality kit effort, and
included in that is… I forget the name. It might just be Reality
Files. They call them Reality Files, and they’re actually have
interactivity in them, and they can be generated from their tool
chain and be shared across tools and all [sorts of] stuff.

So, I was talking to someone on the
market team about it, and I said, “oh, that’s really cool. You
know, we’ve had to do our own thing, and we want to learn more about
your file format, and maybe it’s gonna become a standard.” And I
was like, “have you guys thought about cross-platform?” And
he said, “we’re already cross-platform.” I’m like, “oh,
wow, that’s great! “And he said, “yeah, you can use it
across iOS; iPad OS or Mac OS.” That was his definition of
“cross-platform.” We think a little bit more in terms of,
we want you to be able to build and view content on Hololens, Magic
Leap, phones, tablets, looking glass display; anything that is a
reasonable place to view AR. We think your interactions should be
able to be distributed on those platforms.

Alan: Let’s put on our business
hat, here: what are some of the business applications that you’ve
envisioned for this? How will people use this?

Paul: So for us, what we’re
seeing is people wanting to add AR capabilities to their existing
systems. And so — as an example, a company that sells CRM platform
for the heavy equipment industry. Well, this is a platform that, when
sales reps go out and they’ve got all this literature around the
different products — and heavy equipment in particular — has all
these crazy configuration options. This company built a platform with
a mobile component that lets them organize all this information, but
it’s all based on, like, PDFs and images and spreadsheets. And so
they said, “we see where AR is super helpful, because we could
— first of all — show something at scale on location to a customer
and say, ‘oh, if you want this backhoe, it’s not going to fit in this
particular area,’ or to show different configurations in the sales
process at scale.” Like, people can actually walk around and
look at this stuff in detail.

So for us, what we’re offering is their
capability to inject an AR capability into their existing platform,
and say, “we’ll just use Torch to build the different pieces of
interactivity in AR, and then use our SDK to be able to surface this
stuff inside of our own app.” We’re seeing a lot of people
thinking like that, which makes a lot of sense, right? As enthusiasts
of the industry, you hope people just go whole hog in, and just say,
“AR is going to disrupt everything, and you should be thinking
about it for not only your marketing, but your internal processes and
your retail side and your sales side.” But rationally, these are
companies that are placing bets, and they’re dipping their toes into
the waters. They’re looking at how they can… oh, man. I just now
thought of this: they’re looking at how they can augment their
current product line, or business, or whatever it is they do. So
we’re seeing a lot of that.

People that are — like it’s said, the
retail side — people that have invested a lot in mobile
applications, and they have these really interesting AR ideas for
their physical locations. Like, when a customer comes in and you have
a personalized experience; you can help guide them to the appropriate
things that they’re looking for. You can make recommendations. All
this great, engaging stuff, but they don’t want to put out the AR app
that that somebody has to download and install, and it’s totally
separate from their primary app that already has millions of
installs. And that way, that works very similar to the CRM example,
where they just say, “we want an AR capability in our app that
we can publish content into, and we want more and more of our team to
be able to create the content and publish it.” So, retail has
been a big one. And eCommerce, you know, obviously; pretty
visualization of a product before you buy it, and making that not
just a model that you stick in your room, and can’t only scale and
rotate it, but it actually tells you about itself and you can
actually buy it in the moment.

This has always been the difficult
question for me to answer, as far as what is the addressable market
for AR. It’s everything. It really is the easier thing for me to say
— as you mentioned in my bio — you know, I kind of got into
software in the very early days of the web. In those early days,
people were saying, “what do we even need a Web site for.

Alan: [laughs]

Paul: And then there’s the
progression of, “well, we should have a Web site, but we’ll just
stick our company’s logo on it. And then an About Us page.” And
then over time it became, “wait a minute: real value is
happening. A real audience exists on this platform. Not only do we
have to have a website, but we’ve got to have some form of
transaction happening there. We could run our support through it. We
could run our business through it.” And then eventually,
everything matures to the point where people say, “well, we’re
going to build a business entirely on top of this. We aren’t this
existing business trying to figure out how to incorporate the web
into it–“

Alan: “–the web IS our
business.”.

Paul: Right. And then the same
exact thing happened with mobile! You have people said, “why do
we need a mobile app?”.

Alan: That is… like, honestly?
The people that are asking these questions: if you’re listening, and
you’re asking, “why do we need an AR app?” Think about what
Paul’s saying here. “Why do you need a website?” “Why
do you need a mobile app?” These are questions that seem
absolutely ridiculous to ask now, because the world is on web, and a
larger portion of the world is now on mobile. If Google is all-in on
AR, Apple’s all-in, Amazon, Facebook, Walmart — like, every major
company in the world gets it. So, it’s coming.

Paul: Yeah. Yeah! Without a
doubt. When? Now that’s the trillion-dollar question.

Alan: You know what? You just
said the magic number: a trillion dollars. And I’m going to unpack
this quick, because I actually predicted that XR will create a
trillion dollars in value, in five years.

Paul: Yeah.

Alan: The industry itself —
just hardware and software — is going to create about between $400-
and $500-billion, right?

Paul: Yeah.

Alan: That’s based on all the
different studies that are coming out. So, just the sales. And if you
add it up… so this year we’ll do probably $20-billion. Last year
was $10-billion. Next year to be $40-billion. It compounds. So by
2021, they’re anticipating $100-billion a year. So, forecast out to
2025: we’re looking at… call it half a billion [dollars] created.
Right? And that’s just half a billion dollars. That’s not factoring
in one dollar of value created for engineers, doctors, hospitals,
designers, retailers, training, education. If you factor in the value
created with this technology, it’s in the multi-trillions.

Paul: Yeah. Yeah! We’re standing
on the shoulders of the web and mobile, and we’re introducing totally
new forms of interaction that we’ve only begun to understand.

Alan: I know! It feels like I’ve
been doing it forever, but it’s only the beginning.

Paul: Yeah, no, it is. It’s
still early days–

Alan: Can I retire yet, Paul?

[laughs]

Paul: No. Not yet. Just like me,
we’ve gotta hang in there a little bit longer.

Alan: I think we’ve got to grunt
it out. So, what is your timeline prediction on this, then? When are
we going to see AR, in its different forms, take off?

Paul: I hesitate to do, like, an
actual year, but what I have observed is that last year, when we were
out in the market, most of the enterprises we were talking to had
experimental and proof of concept-type budgets — things that were in
the emerging tech group, or some kind of R&D fund.

Alan: “We hired a kid out
of high school to work on Unity.”

Paul: Yeah. This year, it’s very
much, very serious conversations around… it’s still early. Most
still haven’t figured it out, how it fits in with their business. We
spend a lot of our time educating — as you do as well — but we are
seeing serious budget considerations around, “this is going to
become part of our business.” And so I do see that progression.
I talked about where it’s, “ehh, this is kind of weird and
experimental. Maybe we’ll do it, just to kind of stand out from the
crowd,” to, “oh, it feels like we really should be on top
of this early, because we’ve got the extra money for it, and time.”
It seems like it’s coming. And then next year, I think there’ll be a
whole lot of people jumping on that bandwagon. I still think we’re
probably — I would say — two to three years out from it being as
vibrant as those Web 1.0 days.

Alan: It’s interesting, because
my prediction — and I don’t say this in public, and I guess this is
going to be the first time I’m saying it — my prediction is: 24 to
36 months, we’re going to see massive growth. Like, exponential
growth. We’re going from $10-billion last year, $20-billion this
year, $40-billion, $60-billion, $100-billion. So, we’ll be in
$100-billion market, which is huge. But we’re also going to be seeing
a roll up of the entire ecosystem. I think there’s going to be big
companies that realize, “oh my God, we need an in-house team for
this.” And rather than try to scrounge it together, they’re just
going to start acquiring studios.

Paul: Yeah.

Paul: And it’s kind of
interesting, because this technology is not just about the platforms
like Torch, but it’s also about the content creators. A lot of
investment has gone into platforms and products, but they’ve
neglected the fact that these studios are really, really vital.
That’s why we actually started XR Ignite; to bring the industry
together, and create a community hub and investment arm and
accelerator. To take these smaller companies that have great promise,
and combine them with corporate clients, and bring them to that point
where maybe they are acquired, maybe they are just selling it. It
doesn’t matter. But we need to bring them together. And I think over
the next three years, we’re going to see an absolute explosion of
growth in this industry.

Paul: Yeah, exactly right. I
think you’re going to see people that already have a kind of
intuitive understanding about how to execute ideas in this new
medium, they’re going to be very valuable people, and there’s gonna
be people that will — like me; I was a graphic designer at a daily
newspaper building ads, and I heard our executive staff of the
newspaper start to think about, “hey, maybe we need a website.”
I’ve been online for a few years at this point, and I knew I could do
enough HTML to help them out. And not only did they let me help plan
the… I was, like a 23-year-old kid helping these executives plan
their online department. But I also got the job as manager once it
got set up.

Alan: Yeah, we’re seeing that
all over the place. Put it this way: one of the kids that we
sponsored when he was 13? He’s 16 now. I think it works for Google
now. He worked for Microsoft last year.

Paul: The other thing that
excites me about it is: I think we should really rethink how software
gets built. AI plays a role in this as well, but that’s one of the
reasons why I was pretty proud that we introduced a totally different
workflow into AR, because we’re not reusing tools from other
industries. We’ve built something from scratch. I think it’ll be
interesting. I don’t know if coding… it may not be coding anymore,
right? It might be application creation. Experience creation.

Alan: Yeah, you’re absolutely
right. I do a talk called The World in 2039, and part of it is, what
are the jobs of the future? What happens when, all of a sudden, our
education system catches onto coding and says, “we’ve got to
teach everybody coding” — which they’re doing now; they’re
starting to teach code, which is great. But what happens when code
starts to code itself, right?

Paul: Yeah.

Alan: We could go down that
rabbit hole for days.

Paul: Yeah. Totally.

Alan: Paul, I want to thank you
so much for taking the time to join me on this podcast. I’m really
looking forward to digging into Torch and seeing what we can build.

Paul: Thank you for having me. I
also wanted to say, you’re a prolific poster on LinkedIn. You’re a
huge advocate for our industry. And I know that’s not easy to do.
Thank you for all the time you put into that.

Alan: I appreciate it. It’s a
labor of love for sure. And my mission in life is to inspire and
educate future leaders to think and act in a socially, economically,
and environmentally-sustainable way. I believe that this technology
is the way we are going to educate in the future. I’m doubling down
on our future, and the kids who will create it.

Paul: Absolutely.